The BA flight which leaves Heathrow at 11.45 am arrives in Los Angeles conveniently around 3 pm. The quality of the food and wine served even in Business Class seems to have improved a little but still leaves one more than a little hungry and thirsty. But the blue skies and sunshine which awaited our arrival combined to alleviate any potential jet lag.
Our first stop en route to northern California revealed not just the state’s natural beauty but also the exciting environment that has driven so many hard-working, entrepreneurial individuals to this extraordinary part of the world.
We arrived in Santa Monica and had been booked into the Hotel Casa del Mar, which combined old-fashioned charm with a location less than a stone’s throw away from the long, gloriously sandy beach and, a couple of hundred yards further away, the cold but magnificent Pacific. Ozone and sunshine make an excellent cure for jet lag.
The hotel’s restaurant, Terrazza, is fine – its menu is ‘modern American’ and, to be fair, no chef in this world could match the magnificence of the sunset on display through the restaurant’s windows. The wine list yielded a bottle of Ramey Chardonnay 2023 and the breakfast service yielded two more attractions.
The first was the sight, not common in London, of a dozen surfers waiting patiently for the waves to carry them back to shore. The second was of being waited upon by a man close to my age (73) and one as follicly challenged as I am. He was not alone as there was an even older man acting as busboy, a role normally associated with men at least 40 years younger. Both were charming and worked hard to make us feel extremely comfortable, appearing to understand the toll taken by the 5,500-mile journey and eight-hour time difference.
The owners of this Santa Monica hotel, brothers Edward and Thomas Slatkin, are to be congratulated on their foresight. When they bought the property in 1997, its attractions were not nearly as obvious. The same can be said of the hard work and endeavour of restaurateur Sherry Villanueva in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone and chef Justin Cogley further north in Carmel.
The Funk Zone lies in downtown Santa Barbara, a stone’s throw from the railway that runs through the city and was in days of yore a conglomeration of warehouses and workshops for the fishing industry. Today, it is a bustling compilation of coffee shops, wine tasting rooms, bars, ice cream parlours, souvenir shops and restaurants.
Villanueva’s company, Acme Hospitality, owns, inter alia, The Lark restaurant and Helena Avenue Bakery next door. The former takes its name from the railway service that used to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles but was discontinued in 1968. Today, it offers conviviality via a series of open-fire pits, a feature that made sitting outside in the last week of October a real pleasure, and in our particular case by an ace waitress. The menu unexpectedly offers a first course that doubles as an excellent dessert.
We had just ordered an ahi tuna crudo, intrigued by the addition of socrates cucumbers (a seedless variety) to share as a first course, to be followed by a New Orleans shrimp toast for JR and a dish of bone marrow served with Parker House rolls for me (shown above), when my eye was caught by one dish listed as a snack: brown-butter rosemary cornbread, which I also ordered. What arrived on a round metal dish was a square of grainy, crisped cornbread, topped with honey and, crucially, sea salt – shown below with the complimentary spiced popcorn. JR would not let any of the waiting staff take it away, finishing it as her dessert and acknowledging its reappearance on the dessert menu. With this we enjoyed a bottle of HMR Cabernet Sauvignon 1977 Paso Robles, given to us earlier that day by Gavin Chanin, presumably from his uncle’s famous cellar. It was still eminently drinkable, if not youthful, but it meant we had to pass on a wine list replete with Santa Barbara’s many fine producers.
The next morning we ate breakfast at Helena Avenue Bakery, as recommended by local wine writer Matt Kettmann, and enjoyed their granola with yoghurt, a cappuccino and a memorable cream-cheese Danish pastry on the patio. We benefited again from what must be a guiding principle of Villanueva’s approach to being a successful restaurateur: that if she looks after her staff, they in turn will look after her many customers.
That evening we were tasting a range of excellent sparkling wines in the elegant Caraccioli Cellars tasting room in Carmel-by-the-Sea in Monterey under the watchful eye of Scott Caraccioli and his late grandparents. They were present via a telling pencil drawing hanging on the wall, showing his grandmother looking somewhat disapprovingly at the produce her husband held before her. They were immigrants from Sicily, part of the wave that created the vast farming community nearby. Salinas Valley was referred to as the ‘salad bowl of the world’ with 1.5 million acres of what Americans refer to as ‘row crops’ – lettuces, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, strawberries and cucumbers. Today, the place of these hard-working smallholders has been taken by a much smaller number of extremely large agricultural companies.
With such a strong agricultural presence to the east, and with Korea and Japan being the next, albeit distant stop west, it is perhaps not surprising that chef Justin Cogley has made his home in Carmel-by-the-Sea since 2011 at Aubergine restaurant in L’Auberge hotel within listening distance of the waves of the Pacific. What did come as a surprise was the skill of the cooking; the unified spirit of the kitchen and the waiting staff; as well as the depth of knowledge of sommelier John Haffey.
They have tried to make it relatively easy for themselves, offering only a tasting menu served concurrently to all diners. On the night we ate there, in the 8 pm service (after the 5 pm one), there were only five tables of two. The largest table is a four in the dining room, though there is an eight-seater in the cellar. It is expensive: our menu was $285 per person plus 20% service. But the food was absolutely delicious and the style of service memorable and distinctive, with chefs as well as waitstaff presenting the dishes.
The show opened with a platter of half a dozen ‘amuse-bouches’ of which the stars were a wagyu tartare (shown above, top left) topped with caviar and Peruvian-cured amberjack taco before three courses that revealed the strong Asian influence. A creamy oyster topped with chicken dashi and served alongside comforting koshihikari rice topped with five spice, followed by a Hokkaido scallop with a herb pesto. Then two meat courses: a dramatic serving of sliced duck breast (shown below) and a slice of ribeye with chimichurri. The desserts were excellent, too; we particularly enjoyed watching a young man combining a bowl of corn ice cream with honeycomb and shishito jam, creating a luscious dessert that had us both reminiscing about the Crunchie bars that we had enjoyed in our dim and distant pasts.
Other highlights of this meal included a sense of teamwork that pervaded the dining room, probably induced by Cogley’s previous career as a figure skater with Disney on Ice. The quality of the baking, in particular the lacquered brioche and the delightful sourdough, was exceptional. As were the biscuits (cookies), that awaited me by my bedside.
Hotel Casa Del Mar 1910 Ocean Way, Santa Monica, CA; tel: +1 (310) 581 5533
The Lark 131 Anacapa St, Santa Barbara, CA; tel: +1 (805) 284 0370
Aubergine at L’Auberge Carmel, Monte Verde St and 7th Ave, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA; tel: +1 (831) 624 8578
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
